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Monday, May 01, 2006

Pak Lah Kicks Ass

Interesting. Sort of "hidden" in an editorial by Brendan Pereira of the New Straits Times today, was the fact that some senior official at the Ministry of Education had his ass "kicked" not too long ago by the Prime Minister himself.

...the unfortunate civil servant who fudged and squirted nonsense at Abdullah at a recent briefing after being asked repeatedly to explain his tardiness got more than a verbal assault.

Those in the briefing room with the Prime Minister that day say he was stumped at the slow pace of some reforms in the education system. Excuses which had been in mothballs for a year were dressed up like original arguments and served up to Abdullah.

He was removed. No ifs or buts. The man — of considerable experience and seniority — was yanked out of his comfort zone and transferred out of the department.

Well, now I'm hung up on who this particular senior official is. Which reform was Pak Lah interested in which was "slow"? What excuse did this senior official provide which ticked off Mr Nice Guy? Arrrghhh.... why is our newspapers so polite in not naming the official and spewing more juicy details?

Anyway, it's good to hear that Pak Lah is wielding some serious stick (not super big stick, but hard enough nevertheless). However, Pak Lah cannot be expected to be going round wielding his stick to every ministry and department to hit everyone (and I'm sure there are plenty of deserving candidates). Here's some additional reasons why Pak Lah should ask the media to be less "polite" in their reporting.

Firstly, since Pak Lah can't possibly go round every department in the country, whoever who got his ass kicked should definitely be publicised as a clear deterrent to all other senior civil servants. Let the media do the stick waving on behalf of the prime minister. That way, I'm certain that productivity at our civil service will go up by a couple of notches, at least in the short term till the next "unfortunate" civil servant gets dipped in hot oil.

Secondly, many of us, I'm certain is getting wary and tired of waiting for Pak Lah to execute his reform pledges. While I'm certain that he means well, his actions (or lack of) results in an almost intolerable slow crawl towards a better Malaysia. Well, actions such as the above, will clearly improve the perception towards the Prime Minister and should hence be publicised accordingly. Name the office, let all know the exact punishment received and dare anyone else to perform equally feebly.

Let's look forward to more ass kicking by Pak Lah, for the good of the country.

Pak Lah should trim the civil servants by half. Our government is too lenient in taking in employees who do not want to work hard. We have over a Million civil servants! Way too many for our population of 24M. Our ideology must change. No more you scratch my back I scratch your back. No more retaining deadwoods. Buck-up or be forgotten.

Well if you go to goverment agency like DBKL, MPPJ and such, you will see most of the people there are not really working. There goes our tax money guys.But at the same time I think the dilemma here is, what are we gonna do with these people if we get rid of them from the job.It could be possible that the Prime Minister had his arm twisted in some sense by the organisation around him. Namely UMNO. What I read so far is, he has been having a lot of obstacle executing some reforms, main reason, people refuse to obey his orders. He is having problem consolidating his powers also due to Mahathir's smear campaign. So I wonder, what is his trump card in this, or perhaps he has none.Pur.Boy

Pak Lah should try to run the country the way successful companies are runned. Forget about SSM, SSB or PTK, just make sure all the staff are working. This can be ensured by the govt servants filling a weekly or biweekly form that account or record what they have been doing every day. No reports of activity shows that they are not working.My opinion is at the present state, if a company is operated the way the government servants work, it will definitely go bust!

It must be your consulting training that made you think this is really anything incredible. Top leaders cannot change things by micromanaging. Punishing one or two civil servant is due-course not a revolutionary change. If Pak Lah is serious about revolutionary change, he need to change policy and systems. The issue is not the civil servant tardiness but why and how to change what made that civil servant a poor performer in the first palce. The only answer is that standards have to be changed and clearly. Even if Pak Lah personally transfer and even fire a hundred civil servants it would not really change things. He must put in place a system where a hundred civil servants get removed without his say so. How? By bringing in a foreign standards higher than the system has now. That foreign standards can only logically be the removal of the NEP.

Examples abound of bad management in civil service. Just look at a group of town council laborers at work. You'll normally see about 10 men doing 2 men's work. (And they usually leave a mess behind them.) That is the kind of excess we talk about. If it happens at low levels in broad daylight, what's happening at higher levels in closed office buildings may be even worse. It's really time to "kill some cats to show the monkeys". Over to you, Pak Lah.